Rupert Murdoch's biographer Michael Wolff has called on "literate people" to boycott books until publishers stop bringing out ghostwritten memoirs by the likes of Sarah Palin.

Wolff, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the recent Murdoch biography The Man Who Owns the News, said that books were "evil". "They're pernicious. They represent themselves as being one thing, when they're insidiously the opposite," he wrote in a column for the news aggregator website newser.com, which he founded. "If there are still good books, they are largely irrelevant to a form and business that is largely about the creation of the artefact – identifier, symbol, leave-behind, brand enhancer. Books are a sales tool. They're propaganda. And they're fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue."

He pointed to Palin, whose bestselling memoir Going Rogue – published last week – was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent. "Sarah Palin, for instance, did not write her book and, what's more, it is not meant to be read like you read a book. It's a preposterous image, someone actually sitting down and furrowing their brow over the Palin work. But this is hardly a point just about Palin," he said. "It's a model followed by almost every politician with ambitions or entertainer without something better to do."

Ghostwritten celebrity books – both non-fiction and fiction – are big business for publishing these days. Novels "written" by Katie Price and Kerry Katona, and memoirs "by" David Beckham, John Prescott, Wayne Rooney and Robbie Williams, have flooded into UK bookshops in recent years, although the celebrity market has slipped slightly this Christmas. Book trade magazine the Bookseller reported yesterday that sales of the top 50 celebrity hardback titles were down 28% last week to £3.3m, compared to the same week the previous year.

"It's a sleight of hand. A bait and switch," said Wolff. "It's not that there is anything wrong, or at least out of the ordinary, with salesmanship or promotional copy, or with even saying you wrote what your ghostwriter wrote. This is the stuff of speeches, advertising, and testimonials. What's insidious here is that these forms, which are understood to be insincere and a confection, are now in the guise of a book, which is understood to be genuine and substantial."

Some readers, he believes, are fooled into believing the book is actually by the celebrity or politician; for those who are not fooled, "the form of the book itself is undermined". "Books lose value and meaning. Real readers come to understand there are fewer and fewer real books," he said. "We have created a giant system of national agitprop, in which books and the book business have become one of the most effective tools." The answer, he said, is for literate people to boycott books.

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